Top 500 Anne Lamott Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.”

— Anne Lamott

202. “I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.”

— Anne Lamott

203. “No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.”

— Anne Lamott

204. “It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.”

— Anne Lamott

205. “If you’re lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There’s only love, you’re made of love.”

— Anne Lamott

206. “How alive am I willing to be?”

— Anne Lamott

207. “Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.”

— Anne Lamott

208. “The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God’s identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it’s the truth.”

— Anne Lamott

209. “God makes a way out of no way.”

— Anne Lamott

210. “Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.”

— Anne Lamott

211. “My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don’t wait for inspiration.”

— Anne Lamott

212. “He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.”

— Anne Lamott

213. “When you love something like reading – or drawing or music or nature – it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.”

— Anne Lamott

214. “I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.”

— Anne Lamott

215. “Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength.”

— Anne Lamott

216. “Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty – you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you’re spackling.”

— Anne Lamott

217. “One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness.”

— Anne Lamott

218. “There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.”

— Anne Lamott

219. “Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.”

— Anne Lamott

220. “It feels like I’m babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.”

— Anne Lamott

221. “When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.”

— Anne Lamott

222. “A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the light – in other words, through life – registering voters as we go, and keeping the faith.”

— Anne Lamott

223. “As the mystics would have us believe, “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.”

— Anne Lamott

224. “I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon – because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.”

— Anne Lamott

225. “Also, I have a pouch below my belly, whereas I’d always had a thin waist before. Now there’s this situation down there, low and grabbable. If it had a zipper, you could store stuff in there, like a fanny pack.”

— Anne Lamott

226. “So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer – please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.”

— Anne Lamott

227. “My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It’s not anything lofty, and it doesn’t have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.”

— Anne Lamott

228. “I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.”

— Anne Lamott

229. “I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don’t love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I’ve been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.”

— Anne Lamott

230. “I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.”

— Anne Lamott

231. “I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.”

— Anne Lamott

232. “People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.”

— Anne Lamott

233. “Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are.”

— Anne Lamott

234. “Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”

— Anne Lamott

235. “It’s almost like learning to meditate to learn to hear what your kid is actually saying.”

— Anne Lamott

236. “All parents are an embarrassment to their kids. Often, grandparents are the relief. Kids don’t have to resist you.”

— Anne Lamott

237. “Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.”

— Anne Lamott

238. “Quiet, deep breath after any prayer is another form of Amen.”

— Anne Lamott

239. “My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.”

— Anne Lamott

240. “There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer’s block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling you talent run down your leg and into your sock.”

— Anne Lamott

241. “Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the ’60s and the ’70s and ’80s was mind altering.”

— Anne Lamott

242. “The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn’t is that you push through the parts where you know that you’ve just written seven pages when all you’re looking for is one paragraph.”

— Anne Lamott

243. “I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.”

— Anne Lamott

244. “I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also, one of the most devoted.”

— Anne Lamott

245. “You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving has to be its own reward.”

— Anne Lamott

246. “But easy’s like, who cares? Easy’s like, how much is easy going to get you?”

— Anne Lamott

247. “What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, “This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.”

— Anne Lamott

248. “But the idea of spending entire days in someone else’s office doing someone else’s work did not suit my father’s soul.”

— Anne Lamott

249. “I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness – and that can make me laugh.”

— Anne Lamott

250. “At our most primitive we are storytellers and dancers.”

— Anne Lamott